by India Arden
But it wasn’t Ember’s fault the damn thing existed, was it?
Just inside, there was a receiving lounge on the other side of the sliding glass doors, flanked by a bar where middle-aged dignitaries could sip their 25-year scotch and gaze out onto the pool without the inconvenience of actually getting wet.
That bar was serviced by one of the ubiquitous servants’ passages.
I mapped it all out in my mind. Slipping in. Skirting the guest wing. A jaunt across the gym—no big deal, my yoga pants would blend right in—and another passage that led right to Blaze’s quarters…and I knew how to be invisible in the House of Fire best of all. It wasn’t the safest place to keep the extractor. That would’ve been the vaults that protected the Distiller all these years. But I knew my brother. And I was certain he wouldn’t let that horrid invention out of his sight.
“When you get to my brother…” I said—and dread registered on both the Rebels’ faces, as they presumed I was about to beg for mercy. “Blaze needs to be stopped. Do whatever it takes.”
We tiptoed through the bar. Our rubber boots squeaked across the parquetry. After the concrete and linoleum emptiness of the Rebel hideout, the compound felt overdone. Gilded and wasteful. I pointed toward the door set into the wood paneling. Not exactly secret—nothing so melodramatic—but crafted to blend in, and not distract the room’s occupants with stray thoughts of the people who served them.
We slipped inside. The lighting changed, from warm and inviting to cold and efficient, and I felt the internal clench I’d been holding begin to ease with the thought that maybe what we were doing had some slim chance of success…until we rounded a corner and nearly ran into one of the maids. I knew her, as much as I knew any of them. Meaning, I’d seen her before, might have even attempted a hello, but I couldn’t tell you her name. And if I saw her outside the compound in her street clothes, I wouldn’t have even registered why the stout, middle-aged woman looked so familiar.
But she sure knew me.
She froze. Her eyes went wide. And she clutched the bundle of rolled-up towels she’d been carrying to her chest with a jerk that made the top one roll off and bounce to the floor. I raised my hands in a “no” gesture—as if that would stop her from sounding the alarm—but instead of drawing breath to scream, she glanced back over her shoulder and put her finger to her lips.
“They know you’re coming,” she whispered urgently. “Run.”
19
I heard the footsteps on the other side of the wall—my brother’s gait taps a particular cadence against the marble—and I knew the maid hadn’t been steering me wrong.
“Regroup,” I gasped, and whirled around to retreat. My first fear was that the Rebels would slow me down, since three people are a lot harder to hide than one. But it turned out exactly the opposite: Zephyr sprinted up ahead and held the door open for both of us. And Rain grabbed me by the arm and encouraged me to keep up with his long-legged stride. We were out the sliding door and threading through the outbuildings by the time Blaze got to the receiving lounge, so there was no way of him knowing we’d been there. Unless we’d left some sort of trace.
Unless the maid talked.
Or, unless she didn’t have to. Because Blaze had Arcane powers now. And for all I knew, he could sense some sort of disturbance, and no matter what he was told, somehow, he just knew.
We dropped down into the sewer and the guys struggled to pull the hatch shut behind us. Rain said, “They’ll see. It’ll be so freaking obvious, the dirt, the grass clippings, they’ll all form a path leading right to us.”
“Just get the damn thing shut, and I’ll handle it.” Zephyr dropped down off the ladder, closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and went still—probably the first time I’d ever seen him stop moving. His lips were distractingly nice, with a pronounced bow to his upper lip.
Rain dragged the cover into position with a metallic scrape, then hopped down beside me. Zephyr remained motionless. Eerily so. I could tell that even Rain—the mellowest guy of the bunch—was antsy to get going. Zephyr must’ve felt it, the two of us dying to go splashing off down the old tunnel before my brother and whoever else he might have Transfigured put a gun to our heads…or, worse, took us apart with their power. But just as I opened my mouth to suggest we’d better move, Zephyr raised one arm, palm-up toward the ceiling, and the breath rushed from my body.
The tunnel lit with a burst of blue light, as if someone had snapped a flash photo. Outside, the wind howled so loud, we heard it even through yards of earth, brick and concrete. When Zephyr opened his eyes, they glowed a cold and cutting blue, glaring enough to light the tunnel like a flashlight. “It’s done.” Even his voice had shifted. Ethereal. Chilling. “Our tracks are covered. Let’s go.”
Rain was first to take off, forging ahead, listening to the water to pick our path through the shifting shadows. I was right on his heels—until I heard a big splash behind me. I whirled around. Zephyr was down on hands and knees in the reeking muck, his hat bobbing upside-down beside him. I must’ve expected him to pop back up like a jack-in-the-box. But he didn’t. He floundered.
With zero hesitation, I ran to his side and knelt in the filthy water. “What’s wrong—did you break something?”
He levered himself up. His arms shook. “Too much…too soon.”
Rain hurried to his other side. He hauled Zephyr up out of the sewage while I retrieved the hat. “Thought you weren’t gonna shoot your load,” he joked…or tried to. Actually, he sounded worried. “C’mon, Zeph. You don’t need to sprint the fifty yard dash, but we do need to get out of here. Now.”
I put on the hat and slung Zephyr’s arm around my shoulder, splattering gunk all over me. And that awful beige raincoat? It was my favorite article of clothing, now. Ever. “You can do it,” I whispered to him as Rain took his other arm. “We got this.”
Zephyr tried to cooperate, but he was mostly deadweight. His feet splashed feebly as we dragged him along. Slow going. But hopefully that wouldn’t matter. Sound carried easily through the abandoned tunnels, and I didn’t hear anyone pursuing us.
My hope was short-lived—a foreboding metal scrape ratcheted through the tunnels.
Maybe Zephyr had covered our tracks, but there were only so many ways we could’ve gotten into that courtyard. Behind us, the hatch we’d fled through opened.
“There.” Rain pointed to a narrow side-branch.
“That’s not the way we came,” I whispered.
“It’s that, or the straightaway.”
True. And if I had to pick between getting lost in a sewer or being caught by Blaze, the choice was obvious. We veered off the main artery and turned off our flashlights. The clammy darkness closed in all around me, air fetid with the stink of rot. I huddled more closely against Zephyr, not to hold him up, but because nestling against him was the only thing that felt remotely safe in those horrid sewers.
“Don’t let your eyes glow,” I whispered to both of the Rebels, even though I suspected Zephyr was so tapped out, he would’ve been outshone by a firefly. And with that, the three of us went totally silent, and impossibly still.
It sounded like several people dropped into the tunnel. What I was hoping was for a few security guards to splash around, see that the old sewers looked empty, and take their search someplace else. What I got was the sound of a familiar voice that chilled me to my very bones.
Flood.
“Turn off the lights,” he said in his flat, eerie monotone. “Then scan it with the infrared.”
I fought with the urge to creep farther from the branch’s mouth. Who knew how far our heat signatures broadcast? Maybe we were out of range, maybe not. But if we moved, the sound of our footsteps would give us away for sure. I held my breath. And slowly, with excruciating delicacy, Rain reached across Zephyr, took my hand in his, and gave it a squeeze.
I squeezed back. For all I was worth.
After a horribly long wait in which I thought I’d pass out from holding my breath,
one of the guards said, “Nothing there, sir. Should we split up and follow the tunnels?”
“Unnecessary,” Flood told him. “Take your crew and head back up. I’ll be right behind you.”
Rain squeezed again, as if to reassure me that everything was working out, and before I knew it, we’d be back at the hideout, trolling through mismatched clothes and lamenting the fact that I’d used up all the shower water.
But one aspect of the whole situation didn’t quite jibe. If Flood was convinced we weren’t there…then why wasn’t he the first one out of the reeking sewer?
I felt his power as a pseudo-barometric shift a split second before I understood what it meant. And then the water around my ankles rippled. Such a small tremor. Practically nothing. But given the way Rain yanked his hand from my grasp and doubled over, I knew that ripple was only the tip of the iceberg.
I’d never seen the old Water Master do anything but complain about cleaning the pool, so I had no clue what Flood might be capable of. Scrying our location? Trying to force the muckwater to tattle on us?
I told myself it was nothing.
Then the water surged.
It swarmed up my body like a living thing, forcing its way over the tops of my garden boots and under my raincoat. It crawled up the cuffs and oozed down my waistband. But that was nothing compared to my face. Rank water forced its way up my nostrils and down my throat. It filled my ears and eyes. It gagged me with its foul sliminess until my entire world was only sewage. And that sewage wanted me dead.
I struggled. Flailed. A thousand pinpricks of starlight burst into my vision—an illusion from a suffocating brain. And then Rain grabbed me by the face, and the whole process happened again. In reverse.
I whooped in a great gust of air, retching, heaving. Me, just me. The Arcana had protected everyone else. We had to be quiet, but my body was beyond my control. “I’m sorry,” I gasped out between the spasms that wracked me. Because I’d insisted on coming along, and now, thanks to me, the guards would swarm down any moment, and Zephyr and Rain were as good as dead.
“He’s gone,” Rain said gently, stroking my hair back from my face. “It’s okay…you’re okay.”
I was most definitely not okay, and maybe never would be. He’d cleared the sewage from my air passages with his power, but the fetid rot had already coated me from throat to sinuses. He held me while I gagged weakly. And on my other side, Zephyr wrapped his arms around me too. I started to shiver. Violently. Even with both of them pressed against me as if they could will their body heat right into me, I felt cold. And shaken. Utterly befouled. Violated in a bone-deep way I could never unfeel.
I shivered so hard it felt like I might come apart. Rain and Zephyr leaned into me as if they could draw the horrible shaking out of my bones, if only they pressed hard enough. Zephyr’s breath was soothingly warm against my neck. Rain’s long-fingered poet’s hands stroked my hair. But whatever comfort they had in them, it wasn’t nearly enough to repair what Flood had tainted.
“He’s gone,” Zephyr repeated—though I noted we were still whispering. “Did his little parlor trick and ran off back to his Tetrad.”
This thing Flood had just done, it was no “parlor trick,” and we all knew it. But if brave words were all we had, they were better than nothing. “Can’t you warm her up?” Rain asked.
“I’m on empty,” Zephyr said. “Any dregs left in my tank got used up when that guy tried to beer-bong us. The Arcana blocked out the attack. Total reflex.”
“Me too. But Aurora got the full-on brunt of it.” I felt a tingle as he trailed his fingertips down my face. Eyelids, nose, lips, chin. “There’s only so much moisture I can pull out of her without making things worse.”
Zephyr asked, “They are all gone, though. Right?”
Beside me, I felt Rain crouch. Touching the sewage, I suspected. Talking to it. “No one down here but us Rebels—unless you count the local flora and fauna.” He flicked on his flashlight and bounced the beam across the tunnel mouth. “But I like to think they’re sympathetic to the cause.”
Zephyr hugged me tighter and pressed his warm lips to my ear. “You got this,” he reassured me, just like I’d told him when he’d nearly turned himself inside out by whipping up a great gale of wind. “Put one foot in front of the other, and before you know it, we’ll be back home.”
Neither one of us was in much shape to move quickly, but Rain slipped between us, and with an arm around each of our waists, guided us down the reeking tunnels, and eventually, out of the sewer.
I have no idea how they managed to get me up the ladder. By then, I was sliding in and out of a dream-like state where all I knew was two sets of hands on me, pushing me through the motions. I had brief flashes of lucidity. Me, sprawled in the backseat of a car that smelled like cigarettes. Rain driving. Zephyr hanging over his seatback, stroking my hair, and insisting I was okay. Somehow, he hadn’t lost his hat. Stained now. But he still had it.
The crunch of tires on broken asphalt.
The sky tilting wildly, clouds pinkish with sunset.
My feet dangling as Rain carried me. His flowy shirt stank like the sewer.
Zephyr calling for the other guys.
And then…a sickening pit of darkness.
20
EMBER
“They should be back by now.” I stood. Paced. Raked my fingers through my hair. “What’s taking so long?”
Sterling didn’t answer. He’d been swearing vividly at the computer every few minutes. Now the paper had jammed—again—and he was busy finessing another printout from the old beast of a printer.
“We have to go after them,” I insisted. “They must need us.”
“Huh. I must have no clue how your Fire talent works. I’d figured it gave you the ability to forgo the lighter fluid next time you burn something down. Not omniscience.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How can we follow when we only know the barest bones of their plan? You and I go in there half-cocked, what good will it do, other than getting the two of us massacred?” He eased the paper from the printer, slightly accordioned, and dropped it into my hand. “If we can’t figure out how to Bond, we might as well give up right now. March up to the Masters and tell them their Arcanum was tasty, but we’re too thick to figure out how to really use the power.”
I snapped open the printout and stared at the diagram. More geometry. Not my best subject. “I don’t know what any of this means.”
Zephyr was the bookworm among us—the straight-A student who’d supported himself through high school by doing the homework of half the football team. And Zephyr wasn’t there.
I dropped the paper on a stack of equally impenetrable diagrams and started pacing again.
“You don’t know they’re in trouble,” Sterling added calmly. “You just think you’re the only one who’s capable, so without you at the helm, naturally, they’re doomed to fail.”
“Not this again.”
“We each have our strengths and weaknesses, Ember. Even you.”
I eased into a chair beside the computer. It was a folding canvas camping chair—we had three dozen of them, all from a crappy dye lot that left them splotchy and unsellable. They were convenient and portable, but highly unsatisfying to slam into when you were trying to prove a point…unless your point was that you enjoyed being sprawled on the warehouse floor in a tangle of aluminum framework and splotchy canvas.
“Does it feel funny,” I asked him, “calling me that?”
He tipped back in the single office chair we’d bothered hauling over from the admin department. The seat was threadbare and full of holes, flattened by the asses of countless minimum wage data entry clerks. The chair creaked. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you, after knowing you as Edward all these years. But when we took the Arcanum—and it felt more like a conversation than a consumption, actually—and you said your Arcane name, something clicked. It was like I’d always misheard a song lyric, and when s
omeone told me what it really was, suddenly it all made sense.”
Yeah. That’s exactly how it had felt when the name popped into my mind. “And yet, you’re still Sterling.”
He almost smiled. “I am who I am.”
It takes someone with that kind of confidence to go around with fishnets peeking through the holes in his jeans when all the other guys are into pro wrestling and monster trucks.
Back then, when we’d first started hanging out, I had the reputation for being the type of kid who could talk anyone into doing anything. The coach of the debate team actually tried bribing me to sign up. But Sterling had always been immune to my powers of persuasion. And I’d always valued his candor.
I still did.
He looked me in the eye and went very serious. “This isn’t just busywork to help you feel better about staying behind. You know me well enough to realize I can’t be bothered to soothe your wounded ego.”
“Clearly.”
“Can we do incredible things now that we’ve Transfigured? Of course. But our elemental talents are just one piece of the puzzle. A flashy piece? Sure, no argument there. It feels like something’s been locked up so tightly inside me, I didn’t even know it was there. And now? It’s free. But these things we can do, manipulating the elements—what if they’re just interesting side effects, and the real power is in the Bonding?”
“That’s all conjecture. Not fact.”
He studied my profile so long it made me uncomfortable. When I stood up and started pacing again, he said, “Because if it is true, and Aurora’s withheld that critical information from us, that means she’s just been telling us whatever we want to hear, feeding us just enough crumbs to gain our trust and lead us into a trap.”
I couldn’t deny it.
“And you’re so attached to her already, you can’t deal with that possibility.”
“Enough,” I snapped.
He sighed and turned back to the computer, a sprawling mass of components Frankensteined together from the guts of a dozen semi-functional machines.
